The Future of Mobile Education Belongs to Platforms.

“What’s your go-to-market strategy?” “How are you going to cut through the noise?” “How are you different than ‘X’?” These are increasingly common questions that mobile education startups are getting asked by investors these days, and few entrepreneurs have great answers. Indeed, with over 50,000 education apps on the App Store, today’s app developers must spend more and more resources on product and marketing in order to cut through the noise. No longer are standalone, single-purpose learning apps able to strike easy riches by simply getting discovered on the App Store. Succeeding as a mobile education app has increasingly become a game of economies of scale. The future of mobile learning belongs to platforms.

Large education publishers are naturally among the best-positioned to create such economies of scale, thanks to their broad customer bases, huge…